Enhance Your Health
Health Tip of the Week: Attn: Vaccine Information
The New Jersey State legislature has scheduled the state Senate to vote on a bill removing religious exemption and to tighten and restrict the medical exemption guidelines for mandatory childhood vaccinations. This has been a very hot topic in NJ politics causing thousands of people to show up at the state capital to protest the bill.
Most people do not have a problem with this bill and think all children should have their mandatory vaccinations. The average person thinks that the anti-vaccine movement is insane and puts the general population at risk to disease.
So, the question at hand is did you ever wonder why people choose not to have their children vaccinated or to not have a flu shot?
It has nothing to do with whether vaccines work and are effective at preventing disease. It has to do with vaccine safety.
Despite what you hear from the pharmaceutical lobby and the talking head doctors or reporters on the nightly news, vaccines are not 100% safe. We would all like them to be, but they are not.
This fact is irrefutable. Statistics show that a certain percentage of children suffer from vaccine injury. Please read the paper insert that comes with the vaccine provided by the drug companies or look it up online. The list of possible side effects from a shot are immense.
If vaccines were 100 % safe, why would our government set up a vaccine injury fund to compensate children who are damaged from the vaccinations and indemnify from law suit the drug companies that manufacture them?
While severe reactions to vaccines do not affect every child and it is statistically a small percentage, it is impossible to know which child will have an adverse reaction to a vaccine. The vaccine procedure than becomes like a Powerball Lottery. Except this is the lottery you do not want to win.
This is why there is a growing movement from parents choosing not to vaccinate. These parents feel that they do not want to take the chance and risk something happening to their children. They would rather risk having their child acquire a childhood illness, which incidentally comes with life-long immunity than possibly have a vaccine injury which may lead to a health condition or even death.
The argument is not the science proving vaccines work (they do work), the argument is that there is an equal amount of sound peer reviewed science that says the additives and fillers in vaccines are neurotoxic and dangerous to the autoimmune system.
The research papers discussing this, despite their validity, are constantly attacked by the pharmaceutical industry and labeled as hogwash.
Other countries have recognized that vaccines given to newborns and children whose immune systems have not yet fully developed can lead to serious health consequences.
The children in the United States are scheduled to have 26 vaccinations before the age of 1 years old. The United States ranks 27th in the world for infant mortality before the age of 1. The top five countries with the lowest incidence of infant mortality recommend 12 vaccinations before the age of 1.
Today, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends 69 doses of 16 vaccines for your child, starting on his or her day of birth and continuing through age 18 — including 49 doses before the age of six.
This is more than double the number of vaccines prescribed 30 years ago. This is why the discussion needs to turn from fear of what will happen to someone if they get an illness like the measles or the flu to vaccine safety.
If the pharmaceutical industry wants more people to be vaccinated, let us start openly and objectively discussing vaccine safety. Let us not rely on studies that are severely outdated or that are solely funded by the drug companies who manufacture the actual vaccine and whose researchers are compensated for positive outcomes on their research.
Invent vaccines that do not contain harmful additives and chemical fillers that may endanger the life and or effect the health of the child that it is being injected into.
If we want the discussion of vaccines to be fair, let us turn the discussion away from vaccine effectiveness and fear of disease to vaccine safety and what can be done to improve the way a vaccine works without risking the health of the person taking it.
Instead of writing bills that remove religious exemptions from vaccination laws, bills should be written and voted upon that require pharmaceutical industries to manufacture vaccines that are free of additives and safer for the overall public.
Once again, I site the pharmaceutical industries own vaccine inserts that list the possible vaccine reactions and the percentage of vaccine reactions and even death that could occur with each vaccination.
I have been in private practice in the State of NJ as a licensed primary health care provider in the field of chiropractic for over 30 years. My practice is family based and pediatrics are a large part of my chiropractic practice. In my over 30 years of practice, the vast majority of my pediatric patients have had vaccinations with no obvious reactions.
That being said, there have also been numerous reactions reported to me that would be considered minor (severe fevers, inconsolable crying for 24-48 hours) to the more serious such as seizures.
Sadly, I can also report that some patients under my care developed severe neurological disorders within hours of a vaccination that have left the children permanently handicapped. As I mentioned at the beginning of my letter, while severe reactions are rare, they do happen and no one can predict which child will have a severe reaction. Again, this is the lottery that no one wants to win.